An Ancient Strife

by Michael Phillips

  A deafening crack of gunfire exploded behind her. Blood splattered across the young man’s back, and he fell face down with a dull thud in the middle of the street.

  Culodina screamed. But the red-coated officer paid her no heed. Already he was galloping after another.

  She fled into the alley, running as fast as she could. She emerged at its far end into a street less congested with soldiers, not realizing she was sobbing. She wiped at her cheeks and across her stinging eyes. Breathing hard, she did her best to collect her thoughts, then tried to follow the directions she had been given.

  Six or seven minutes later, keeping to the shadows and side streets and managing to avoid most of the riders, she approached the Cairngorm Arms.

  A kilted figure hurried limping out of the building twenty yards in front of her, dark splotches on his skin and clothes, a dreadful gash on one leg.

  Culodina’s feet froze, eyes widened in mingled joy and horror.

  He ran across the street toward an alleyway.

  “Sandy!” she cried out.

  He stopped and turned. She ran toward him. As she drew near, Culodina beheld the horrible sight more closely—his clothes muddy and torn, blood on shirt and kilt. And the huge wound on his thigh, still oozing dark crimson, his eyes red from bitter weeping.

  “Oh, Sandy . . .” she said, breaking into fresh tears at the sight. “It is you!”

  She stretched out her arms to embrace him, heedless of mud and blood, relieved to ecstasy that he was alive.

  “I was so afraid! I thought I might not—”

  Suddenly a grotesque expression of horror on his face stopped her. His mouth seemed trying to speak. His lips quivered. He took a step or two backwards, the look of revulsion spreading to eyes, then turning to hatred.

  “Get away from me!” he shouted, not even recognizing his own clothes on her body nor pausing to question how she had come here. “Get away . . . get away!”

  The voice was strange, foreign, and empty. It was not the voice of the Sandy Gordon she knew.

  “Sandy . . . Sandy,” she said, continuing to walk toward him. “Don’t be afraid. It’s me—Culodina.”

  “I know who you are!” he spat, continuing to back away. “Get out of here—go away!”

  “Sandy, why . . . what are you talking about . . . I want to help—”

  “Help?” he shrieked like a wild man, then howled in a tormented laugh. “I want none of your help! I never want to see you again. Do you think I don’t know who you are, Culodina Sorley, daughter of the traitor Tullibardglass. I know you well enough!”

  “But . . . but why, Sandy . . . what are you talking about?”

  “My father is dead!” he shouted.

  “Oh, Sandy!” exclaimed Culodina, breaking again into tears of heartbreak, “I am so sorry!”

  Again she started forward to embrace him.

  “Get away from me!” he spat out yet again. “My father is dead, I tell you—dead by your father’s hand!”

  “Sandy,” she exclaimed in horror, “what are you saying!”

  “That your father killed the best man in Scotland. He shot my father, who is lying on the battlefield. I can’t even bury him! And if one of the redcoats finds me here, I’ll have my own throat slit or a sword run through me.”

  “But when . . . where . . . ?” Culodina whimpered in a voice about to fail her. Tears streamed down her face.

  “Culloden . . . on Drummossie Moor,” replied Sandy, “—the moor of death!”

  He burst into a wail of remorseless sobbing, then ran for the alley . . . and was gone.

  Thirty-Four

  How Culodina Sorley found the evil battlefield, she could not have said.

  She tied her mount to a shrub and walked among the dead from that afternoon’s slaughter, her broken heart weeping with a bitterness deeper than any feeling she could have imagined—for Sandy and his father, as well as for what her own father had become. She had seen signs of it for years. But the love of a daughter for the only parent she knew had prevented her admitting what kind of man he had gradually turned into. Now that she saw it, she realized she could never love him again.

  Never had she felt such desolation. Her mother had been taken from her before she could remember. Now the only other people she cared about were gone too. Sandy, whom she loved, hated her. His father was dead. And her own father had become a murderer to despise rather than a father to love.

  What was left for her? Where would she go, to whom could she turn? How could she face Aunt Aileana again and look her in the eye after what her father had done? The poor dear lady, left a widow for a cause she would never understand . . . and she did not even know it yet.

  As Culodina wandered senseless among the dead, stepping over corpses, wails and moans from the wounded and dying sounding from every direction, her feelings were frozen senseless. She did not stop to consider her own danger, nor that the afternoon’s killing was by no means ended. In her stupor she had given up the effort to disguise herself as a man. She had long since lost Sandy’s bonnet, and her light hair fell free on her shoulders. But for present, few paid her heed.

  Dead horses and overturned carts and wagons, swords and clothes and tattered tartans were strewn everywhere. Bodies had fallen so thick that in places she had to walk around mounds of dead men, boys no more than fourteen or fifteen, mutilated parts of arms and legs—indescribable sights no human should have to see. And blood . . . blood . . . blood everywhere.

  In every direction for miles, what remained of the massacred Highland army fled, while its prince, now a fugitive, made his way across the river to safety with a small escaping band of rebel horsemen. Prince Charles had not left the field in cowardice. He had watched the horror unfold, weeping for the army that had stood with him till the end, reluctant to depart the scene. Finally O’Sullivan had grabbed the reins of his horse and pulled him away.

  Those of Cumberland’s infantry ordered to remain at the site for the rest of the afternoon took a break on the battlefield to enjoy a midday dinner of biscuits and cheese, laughing and talking amongst themselves in a spirit of grisly sport. A few glanced her way as Culodina passed fifty yards away. One rose, took a step or two toward her, then seemed to reconsider and returned to the cluster of his comrades. One of their officers would later write of the scene, “The moor was covered with blood, and our men, what with killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in the blood, and splashing it about one another, looked like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.”

  As they ate, the Englishmen kept watch for jerks of movement from the piles of dead and took turns walking toward such remnants of humanity to shoot or bayonet whatever form of life might be struggling beneath them.

  As horrifying as the battlefield was, Culodina could have no idea what other atrocities were going on even then throughout the surrounding countryside, though in the distance an occasional scream or report of gunfire evidenced clearly enough that the killing was not done.

  A certain farmer by the name of Alexander Young was plowing in his field a mile or two away that afternoon and did not even know there had been a battle. Suddenly clansmen came running across his field. Whatever was going on he didn’t know or care, but it looked dangerous. Young dropped the plough and ran for his house. But he was spotted by some English dragoons, who galloped after and shot him as he tried to open his door. Bleeding, he ran into the house. The horsemen dismounted and followed him inside to finish with the sword what they had begun. They killed his eight-year-old son in the same manner, while the boy’s brother darted to safety through a hole in the cottage’s earthen wall.

  In a farmhouse in Culwhiniac, the wife of a certain farmer named MacDonald had been mixing, kneading, and baking bread all morning for the poor hungry young men she had been helping feed for days. She knew no other way to cope with the terrible sounds outside than to keep her hands busy, and she had kept up her baking all through the battle.

  Suddenly through her door burst one of
Prince Charles’s faithful, who had lost his hand to an English sword only minutes before. In horror she watched as he ran across her floor, blood gushing from the stump at his wrist, and thrust the bleeding end of his arm straight against the burning stones of her fireplace to staunch the wound and stop the bleeding.

  From the surrounding farms and hamlets and villages, spectators had come out that morning to watch the battle, only to be themselves swept up in the tragic drama. Once the butchery was on, the English soldiers had little sympathy for innocent bystanders. Their curiosity on that day cost hundreds their lives.

  A traveler that fateful evening between Nairn and Inverness, had he lived to tell about it, would have seen hundreds of dead bodies, only a few of them belonging to rebel soldiers. He would have seen women stripped and shot, lying in the fields or at the side of the road in indecent positions that testified to the morbid lust of their murderers . . . a boy of twelve in the middle of the road, his skull crushed and the features of his face unrecognizable . . . naked, castrated men with their private parts placed in their dead hands . . . bodies everywhere . . . men, women, children all slaughtered together. Perhaps the soldiers of Cumberland’s army and the Campbells who fought with them were humane individuals who had wives and children of their own to whom they would return to live normal lives again when this terrible day was but a memory. But on this afternoon, for a few hours, they became wild beasts intent on perverse cruelty toward their own kind.

  Back at the battlefield, Culodina continued to walk through the carnage, gagging as she surveyed the dead faces, looking for that one familiar form she sought. She could not keep her stomach still for the revolting sight of bodies and screams and moans and cries. The stench of death had not yet begun, though in her nostrils she could smell the blood that she was trying to keep from Sandy’s boots and trousers as she stepped over and walked around the dead. She gagged again, then finally lost the dinner she had eaten earlier, vomiting uncontrollably over a pile of four or five corpses.

  How she found the one body among more than two thousand dead she would never know—any more than how she had got to the battlefield. But at last she found herself standing over the lifeless form with the familiar face. Mercifully the eyes were closed.

  At last Culodina’s emotions gave way and she sobbed bitterly, falling to her knees beside this man she had loved. That her own father had done this was a grief more miserable and horrible even than the fact of Sandy’s poor father lying dead on the ground beside her.

  She gathered her courage, then reached down and slid her hand under the lifeless shoulders. She was able to lift the stiff body enough to unwrap the cloaklike plaid, its tartan weave of green and black stained dark with blood, and pull it from around him. Through the torn and tattered shirt she felt the death chill of his body on her hand. She shivered with a cold whose memory would never leave her. The pale look of the dead face, whiter than any snow, was so terrifyingly different than a face asleep—a ghastly, empty shell that looked almost human, but whose soul was no longer within sight beneath the skin.

  Kendrick Gordon’s hand still clutched the dirk. Had he been defending himself, she wondered. Or perhaps defending Sandy? If she knew Kendrick Gordon, he would never have raised it against her father.

  With great effort she spread apart the cold, lifeless fingers one at a time, shivering again as she touched them, forcing the stiff joints to release their death grip on the great Highland knife. All at once she spun about again to vomit, though there was little left inside her to spew on the ground, then continued what she had begun until the knife was loose.

  With one final tearful look of farewell, she rose and left the battlefield for her waiting horse.

  Thirty-Five

  APRIL 19, 1746

  Culodina Sorley returned to Glen Truim, though she hardly knew how. She did not later remember the route she had taken, how long it had taken her, where she had stopped to eat or sleep, or if she had done so at all.

  Hours and minutes, days and nights all blended into a blur of waking stupor—grief, anguish, tears, and forgetfulness, Sandy’s stunning and horrifying words still searing her brain.

  Men came and went, running, riding, escaping, pursuing. That she was herself in grave danger she did not reflect on. If she were to die now, what was that to her? Death would be a welcome reprieve to stop the images in her brain and prevent her having to do what she had to do. But even now that she was dressed in her own clothes, no one bothered her. All the people she encountered seemed to have other things on their minds. Thus, death did not come to release her from the dungeon of her silent torment.

  At length she found herself approaching Cliffrose Castle. It was Saturday, though she did not know it. She had been gone five days.

  She saw the beloved castle in the distance, then reined in her horse. For long minutes she sat, wondering if she could go through with what she must do. She had only one friend left in the world. Yet the news she had to bring that dear one was sure to crush her heart to ashes and perhaps make her scream just as Sandy had. How could poor Aileana do otherwise? How could she not hate the daughter of the man who had murdered her husband?

  But her steps had brought her this far. She could not ride away now.

  With the resigned air of one approaching her own doom, Culodina slowly urged her horse forward.

  Inside Aileana heard the approach.

  Fear seized her heart at the slow sound of hooves. She ran to the window.

  A single rider . . . it was a woman . . . and it looked like—

  Again Aileana’s heart leapt inside her, but this time for joy at Culodina’s return! She flew toward the door.

  Culodina dismounted, then drew in a deep breath of agony, full of the horrible image of the beloved white face on the cold moor. With slow, trudging steps she walked toward the castle.

  Aileana hurried out into the cold afternoon, a relieved smile spreading over her face, and ran to greet her young friend.

  Gradually her step slowed. Her smile faded as she took in the tears and the red eyes . . . the anguished expression on Culodina’s face?

  Slowly Culodina came forward, lifting her hands with the folded bloodstained plaid and dirk lying on top of it.

  “Oh . . . oh, Aunt Aileana,” she began, “I’m so sorry . . .”

  With sudden horror, Aileana Gordon knew all.

  A great disconsolate wail filled the glen. The next minute, the two women fell weeping into one another’s arms, the great tartan cloak falling to the ground, the dirk clattering onto the stones beside it.

  “And Sandy?” Aileana finally ventured to ask, though her heart was terrified to utter the words.

  “He is alive,” whispered Culodina. It was enough for now. She would not add to the poor woman’s grief just yet by telling her at whose hand her husband had fallen.

  Aileana’s arms clutched Culodina tightly again, feeling a surge of mother’s relief in the midst of the wife’s despair. She broke into passionate sobs against Culodina’s shoulder.

  Even as she stood weeping with the one she had always called her aunt, Culodina knew she would have to leave Cliffrose. Where she would go, she hadn’t an idea.

  Returning to Tullibardglass Hall, however, was out of the question.

  Thirty-Six

  APRIL 21, 1746

  That evening they spent tearful but together, bearing in each other’s company the old curse of Scotland’s women that now had visited Cliffrose.

  All the while, a terrible stone of ice sat at the pit of Culodina’s stomach for what she knew. She had to tell her, but she could not bring herself to it. She did not think she could bear the disgrace of the truth in Aileana’s eyes.

  On Monday morning, about an hour before noon, they heard the approach of horses. From the sound it might have been a small army. They were moving rapidly, their business urgent.

  Both women hurried to the door. A dozen riders approached, more than half dressed in the red coats of government troops. At the
sight, Culodina’s stomach lurched. Horrifying visions of Culloden swept through her brain. It was all she could do to keep herself from hating every one of them for no reason other than the red they wore. She recognized but one among them.

  “We are in search of the outlaw who calls himself Prince Charles Edward Stuart,” announced the lead rider. The contingent behind him sat stoically in the saddle. He scarcely acknowledged their acquaintance as he spoke. A momentary glance toward the younger of the two women was the only sign he gave of recognition. “We have reason to believe he is hiding in the western Highlands,” continued Culodina’s father. “Have you seen him?”

  Though Aileana did not yet know the full truth, the demeanor of her husband’s cousin and the expression on his face told her something was seriously wrong. “Of course not,” she replied cautiously, summoning from some reservoir of strength the dignity of her husband’s name. “He is certainly not here.”

  “Where is your son, Lady Gordon? He was seen with him somewhere south of Fort Augustus.”

  “Neither have I seen my son,” replied Aileana. At last she gave way to the humanity of their long association. “Oh, Murdoch . . . please,” she began, “you know—”

  “I have no time for that now, Lady Gordon,” he interrupted.

  Culodina’s father lifted his hand, and from inside his coat pocket now pulled a folded paper. Once the victor in the contest for Scotland had been decided, he had wasted no time in claiming his portion of the spoils. He urged his horse forward a step or two and handed the paper down to her. She took it, but kept it folded in her hand.

  “I am possessing myself of Cliffrose Castle,” he said coldly. “That paper indicates forfeiture of the property and has been duly signed by the duke of Argyll. It is your husband’s doing, Lady Gordon, that it has come to this. He was a traitor, and this is the price for treason.—Culodina, come with me.”

  Both women were so stunned by the words they could not immediately reply. Tullibardglass nodded to several of the men behind him, who immediately dismounted and came forward. Before Culodina could utter a peep of protest, her hands were tied, and she was mounted on a horse from the stables for which the viscount had sent one of his men.